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Chapter 13: Mind Is the Bondage

To speak to such people is almost worse than speaking to a wall. I took the initiative of greeting them and they were not even human enough to respond to the greeting, and particularly in the East, such ugliness is unforgivable. And they have been insisting on the interview. I was reluctant - reluctant for the simple reason that they would ask stupid questions, then they would distort what I say. But when I saw that they had come with the whole staff of the Times Of India press, I agreed.

But I really agreed for Samir Jain. He is a young man, he has been to the ashram before, he has meditated. He wanted to become a sannyasin but his father was absolutely against it, so much against it that if he became a sannyasin, his father would disown him. Now they are some of the richest people of the country. He has not the guts to say to the father, “It is perfectly okay, you can disown me,” but he has a sympathetic heart - and he was the only man who raised his hands.

Now to talk to such people becomes impossible, unless you completely forget them, and whether they exist or not. And that’s what I had to do. I did not look at them at all, I just looked at my people and talked to my people. And I made a condition to them that they could not distort any statement; they had to publish my whole statement as I have given it. But they don’t even have the guts to publish their own questions and my answers, because my answers expose the dirty politics and the dirty journalism that follows politics.

Bodhidharma speaks as if he’s speaking to himself. Then he can open his heart totally, without any limitation. He is absolutely unconcerned about who is going to listen to him, who is going to read him. Perhaps this is the reason why he reaches tremendously deep insights into human nature. You will see statements that have never been made before, but Bodhidharma has made them so clearly that they cannot be refuted either.

These sutras have been in existence for at least one thousand years, but no Buddhist scholar has commented on them. The book was kept hidden in the Buddhist pagodas, temples. It has just been discovered a few years ago by some Western scholars, and they could not believe that Buddhists have not been allowing the world to know what such a tremendously significant book contains. I can understand the fear of the Buddhists. They have translated thousands of books into English and into German and into other international languages, but Bodhidharma has been neglected completely.

It is a strange world. Here, to be sincere and truthful is the most dangerous thing.

Just a few days ago, here in Pune, the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, Swami Svarupanand, declared in a press conference that “Osho is unparalleled, the most dangerous man in the whole history of mankind.”

I don’t go out of my house. I am not a terrorist. I am not interested in any power politics. I don’t have any nuclear weapons. On what grounds is this man saying that I am unparalleled the most dangerous man in the whole history of mankind? What danger is there?

The danger is that I don’t care about anybody when it comes to asserting the truth. It is not that I am dangerous. It is the truth that is dangerous.